This invention pertains to the field of digital signal compression and quantification. More specifically, the present invention related to a system and method that provides scaleable resolution image recording and storage.
Electronic motion image recorders have traditionally been designed for one or at most only a few motion image formats. With the advent of various high definition video, medical, scientific, and industrial formats, there is a requirement for single systems which can support a broad range of motion image formats. As motion image frame rates, image sizes, and pixel resolutions increase, there is a tremendous increase in the amount of data that must be maintained to represent the motion image stream in the sample domain. This places a large burden on the processing, storage, and communications costs to support these data sets at the desired resolution.
The present invention provides an efficient and cost effective system which can be configured to effectively support all motion image formats. The system can be modularly expanded to increase throughput, and can trade off system throughput between the number of image streams, their frame rate, frame resolution, and pixel resolution. The system uses subband methods throughout to support variable image size and frame rate recording. This allows a single image stream to be divided into multiple lower rate streams to allow more reasonable processing rates. The present invention also enables the application of a variable sized array of standardized image processing components.
More specifically, optimized storage and efficient communication is achieved by storing image streams in the information domain, rather than the sample domain. This typically provides a dramatic reduction in storage and communication requirements, while still providing a guaranteed recording quality. Unlike conventional video tape recorders, this system can also place recordings onto the same removable storage medium at any desired image resolution, frame rate, and quality.